Autonomous driving is still a feast for the capital market.
On December 22, Great Wall Motor's Zhixing obtained nearly 1 billion yuan of A round financing, investors including Meituan, Hillhouse Venture Capital, Qualcomm Venture Capital, First Trip Holdings, Jiuzhi Capital, etc., and the funds raised will be mainly used for autonomous driving research and development investment and talent system construction, with a post-investment valuation of more than US$1 billion.
As early as the beginning of last year, Zhixing announced the completion of a 300 million yuan Pre-A round of financing, and the investors were Shougang Fund, Meituan, Hillhouse Venture Capital, Beijing-Hebei Capital, etc. It can be seen that Meituan and Hillhouse Venture Capital have sold more than once.
In just ten months, it has obtained two rounds of financing from well-known investment institutions, with a total financing amount of 1.3 billion yuan, and Zhixing obviously has its charm.
1
Born from Great Wall Motors
In 2015, the Intelligent Driving System Development Department of Great Wall Motor Co., Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as "Great Wall Motor") was established, and in 2019, it independently and registered Millima Zhixing Technology Co., Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as "Momo Zhixing").
With the goal of zero accidents, zero congestion, free travel and efficient logistics, Zhixing is an artificial intelligence technology company dedicated to autonomous driving, helping customers reshape and comprehensively upgrade the travel and logistics mode of the entire society.
The company's two core figures, Chairman Zhang Kai and CEO Gu Weihao, are from Great Wall Motor and Baidu, the former with more than 20 years of experience in automotive engineering research and development, and Baidu, who was responsible for L3 level autonomous driving, car networking, maps and other businesses at Baidu.
Image source: The public account of Zhixing
The company's core R & D personnel are also partly from The Intelligent Driving R&D team of Great Wall Motors, and some are from head technology companies such as Baidu and Huawei, with a team size of nearly 600 people.
Deep binding to Great Wall Motors, so that since the advent of the zhixing has a higher starting point than its peers, in just two years, the company has created 12 products, and achieved scale landing.
12 products of Miller Wisdom Bank, Source: Miller Wisdom Bank Public Account
The scale landing is of great significance to Zhixing, on the one hand, it means that it can accumulate massive scene data, on the other hand, it also means that it will have more advantages in price.
In 2021, the driving assistance system has been installed in 5 series of tens of thousands of mass production vehicles totaling 5 models, such as Weipai Mocha, Tank 300 City Edition, Weipai Maqiduo, and Harvard Divine Beast, and the auxiliary driving mileage has exceeded 4 million kilometers.
Not long ago, Zhixing co-launched a small magic box 3.0 automatic driving computing platform equipped with a new generation of AI automatic driving technology with Great Wall Motors and Qualcomm, with a single board computing power of 360 TOPS and a sustainable upgrade to 1440 TOPS.
Official data shows that by the end of 2022, its driver assistance system is expected to be more than 40 models and include models that have already been installed, and more than 1 million passenger cars will be equipped in the next three years, but it is worth noting that the company's orders are all from Great Wall Motors.
With the continuous update and iteration of assisted driving system technology, the autonomous driving scenario will gradually extend to urban roads, and the competition in the second half will be fully unfolded in the urban open scenario.
A few days ago, after the official launch of the ideal NOA, the new car-making force Wei Xiaoli has fully completed the installation of auxiliary driving functions, coupled with the industry leader Tesla, these four car companies have achieved remarkable results in the L2 level of automatic driving on urban roads.
Tesla Automatic Assisted Navigation Driving (NOA)
From the perspective of computing power, Tesla's 144 TOPS and Xiaopeng's 30 TOPS are relatively ahead, and from the hardware point of view, its camera, ultrasonic radar and millimeter wave radar have a significant advantage in quantity.
Image source: Network
In the city pilot auxiliary driving function, the ultimate zhixing is also not far behind, recently announced the NOH road test video, in the process, the test vehicle of the company traveled a total of 11 kilometers, the whole journey of a total of 34 minutes, during the period through 24 intersections, 27 pedestrian crossings (including 5 unprotected sidewalks), 22 traffic lights, 2 four forks roundabout.
Urban NOH is scheduled to be delivered in the first half of 2022, and full-scenario NOH is scheduled to be delivered by the end of 2022, while Chi Heng will also launch a new HSD for autonomous driving, as well as a Robotaxi fleet equipped with HSD.
At present, Xiaopeng Automobile is a car company with a faster automatic driving layout, according to its planning, its urban pilot auxiliary driving function and the rhythm of zhixing are consistent, and will be implemented in the first half of 2022.
Relying on Great Wall Motors, Zhixing can quickly open the market and achieve hundreds of millions of yuan in revenue in 2021, becoming the fastest growing autonomous driving company in China, but with the intensification of competition in the field of passenger car autonomous driving, open and diversified ecological cooperation is particularly important for the company.
2
Accelerate layout unmanned delivery
Data intelligence is the key to the success of autonomous driving.
Recently, Zhixing released Mana, China's first autonomous driving data intelligence system, namely Snow Lake, which is the core driving force for the evolution of the company's capabilities in the future.
Architecturally, MANA consists of four major sections, namely TARS (Data Prototype System), LUCAS (Data Generalization System), VENUS (Data Visualization Platform) and BASE (Underlying System), and has five major capabilities including perception, cognition, annotation, simulation, and computing.
Data is the biggest driving force of artificial intelligence, but also the biggest cost in its evolutionary process, and the core of data intelligence is to reduce costs, improve the speed of iteration, only to achieve large-scale mass production, in order to recognize the problems in the development of automatic driving, but also to continuously improve the level of intelligence.
As the increase in data consumes more and more computing resources, a strong computing center will be indispensable, so Zhixing plans to build a MANA supercomputing center to achieve more efficient data mining and data handling.
In terms of terminal logistics unmanned vehicles, Zhixing has also been involved in it for a long time.
In the logistics distribution process, the final link of the customer's acceptance of the goods is called the "last kilometer", and the delivery of the last kilometer is of great significance and is the key link connecting the e-commerce platform and the customer.
Although the last kilometer distance is short, but its distribution cost accounts for more than 30% of the entire logistics distribution cost, on the one hand, labor costs are too high, the mobility of delivery personnel is large, the employment gap is large, it is difficult to improve the quality of service, on the other hand, family privacy, information security and other issues are difficult to solve.
Therefore, the superiority of the "last mile" of unmanned distribution has emerged, and it is also the direction that related industries have been exploring.
In the field of unmanned distribution, Zhixing assumes the dual roles of manufacturing and independent operation.
Ali and Meituan are important customers of the company, the company is providing production and manufacturing, factory testing and verification, scale mass production and other services for Ali driverless logistics distribution vehicle "Little Wild Donkey", this year's double 11,350 small wild donkeys into the national universities, 10 days to deliver more than 1 million parcels, 50% earlier than the original plan to achieve the double 11 predetermined goal, in addition, the end of the zhixing also cooperated with the United States to launch the latest generation of "magic bag 20", mainly responsible for the distribution of 3 kilometers at the end of the city, providing residents with fresh fruits and vegetables, Takeaway and other instant delivery services, at present, "Magic Bag 20" has covered more than 20 communities, and the cumulative delivery orders on the public test road are nearly 100,000.
Little Wild Donkey, Image Source: Network
Magic Bag 20, Image Source: Network
At the same time, Zhixing also personally went down, and cooperated with the chain supermarket Wumei multi-point app to create a terminal unmanned delivery vehicle "Little Devil Camel", which can accurately reach each other between the store and the user community throughout the day.
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epilogue
In the future, the auxiliary driving function will become the standard of each car, the market space is quite broad, at present, 70% of the scientific and technological innovation in the automotive industry comes from the field of automatic driving technology, and large and small car companies are actively laying out, making the industry competition continue to upgrade.
Millima Zhixing focuses on assisted driving city scenarios, data intelligence and terminal unmanned logistics, covering a wide range of automatic driving fields, and is expected to build an efficient and complete closed loop between data and products, however, at present, the company's assisted driving system has a single customer, and the unmanned distribution business is not yet mature, the company's profitability has not yet appeared, and how far the company can go in this money-burning track is still unknown.